Prepared for the Office of Naval Research, this final technical research report argues that military planning must give professional political judgment standing comparable to technological and economic expertise. Extending the authors’ earlier Science and Defense, it asks how planners can prepare for the international conditions in which weapons, forces, doctrines, and strategies will become operational five to fifteen years later. Its nine sections move from the scope of military research and development through the limits and methods of forecasting to expert qualifications, administrative arrangements, and recommendations for further research.
The starting point is a distinction between operating military forces and exercising military power: the latter means influencing an opponent’s behavior. Technically superior weapons may therefore be politically unusable. Nuclear deterrence, escalation risks, and resistance to intervention make political conditions constitutive of military effectiveness, not external complications to an otherwise technical calculation. The authors consequently broaden R & D to include doctrine and strategy alongside hardware. These activities develop reciprocally; their unequal financial costs do not establish their relative importance. Military capabilities must also remain compatible with changing American policy objectives, rather than merely accommodate changes abroad.
It is the thesis of this paper that politico-military forecasting should be regarded as equally important to military plans that have a major bearing on the military capabilities and posture of the United States.
This claim introduces the report’s central difficulty: such forecasting is indispensable, yet reliable prediction of consequential political events is unavailable. Historical surprises expose the inadequacy of confident long-range forecasts, while the authors’ causal explanation goes deeper. Wars, revolutions, and crisis decisions emerge from interacting conditions whose identities, weights, and future changes cannot be established beforehand. Statistical regularities concerning classes of events do not make singular historical outcomes predictable. Simulation, gaming, computers, and expert consensus may stimulate thought, but cannot overcome deficient knowledge of the relevant relationships.
The planning dilemma admits no escape through technical specialization. Commitments must precede knowledge of the conflicts they will serve, while resources cannot support forces suitable for every contingency. Assuming an unchanged international environment invites surprise. Preparing principally for the worst imaginable future can waste resources, neglect different contingencies, and provoke counterarmament that helps produce the feared outcome. The alternative is a more modest and explicit intellectual practice.
Conjecture is reasoned inference from admittedly defective evidence.
Unlike tacit intuition, conjecture makes competent use of available evidence and exposes its reasoning to criticism. Its confidence should vary with both the object and the time horizon. Tangible capabilities are generally more conjecturable than political predispositions, and both are more conjecturable than particular events. Longer horizons ordinarily increase uncertainty, although stable underlying trends may sometimes be clearer than short-term fluctuations.
The report distinguishes four approaches. Intelligence provides indispensable short-term estimates, but should not be expected to forecast the precise outbreak of wars or revolutions. “Typing” replaces forecasts of unique cases with analysis of classes of opponents, missions, theaters, and political constraints. Counterinsurgency illustrates the method: common geographical and infrastructural conditions can suggest requirements for mobility, suitable equipment, and political competence without identifying the next country of intervention. These examples retain the assumptions of contemporary American intervention policy, even as the authors insist that future policy itself may change.
For major powers whose individual characteristics matter, alternative futures widen planners’ perspectives without pretending to identify one probable destination. Soviet behavior and NATO cohesion, for example, must be considered in connected configurations. Subjective probabilities may inform judgment, but remain provisional.
Planning must be based entirely or primarily on neither the most plausible nor the worst-possible of a set of futures.
The purpose is to insure against severe dangers without sacrificing suitability for other futures, while considering how American choices might encourage more favorable developments. Trend analysis supplies the fourth approach. The declining availability of overseas bases, driven by persistent political pressures, is more conjecturable than the fate of any particular installation. Its implications range from longer-range forces and improved transport to rapid base construction or changes in policy. Continuous reassessment remains essential.
The institutional argument follows directly: better conjecture requires people and organizations capable of producing, criticizing, and using it. The political expert must combine broad knowledge, conceptual sophistication, pattern recognition, military familiarity, and the ability to use specialists. Explicit reasoning distinguishes professional advice from oracular judgment. Existing institutions cultivate these capacities unevenly: immediate operational demands and narrow specialization discourage sustained synthesis.
Political expertise must therefore enter planning routinely and co-equally, supported by executive commitment and specialized long-range analytical capacity. Important disagreements should reach decision-makers rather than disappear through bureaucratic smoothing. The authors acknowledge that they supply conceptual prerequisites, not a detailed administrative blueprint or comprehensive account of organizational bargaining. They also concede that no timely, definitive performance measure exists: retrospective tests arrive too late, although logical scrutiny and continuing review remain useful.
If we continue to muddle through, which is the inevitable nature of this business, we will then do it better.
The closing recommendations make conjectural methods, professional qualifications, training, and institutional use subjects of sustained interdisciplinary R & D. The report’s enduring contribution is to connect uncertainty with administrative responsibility: political assumptions cannot be eliminated from military planning, but they can be made explicit, professionally examined, and revisable.
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